The political ecologies of fire: Recasting fire geographies in British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

How fires burn across British Columbia (BC), Canada is shaped by settler coloniality, timber capitalism, state forestry regimes, criminalization of burning, and Indigenous resistance. Despite the urgency of confronting the fire suppression paradox embedded in settler colonial fire management laws and practices, approaches to studying fire in Canada that foreground Indigenous law and de-center settler colonial governance is scarce. As political ecologists and geographers working and living in the context of unceded and ancestral lək̓ʷəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, and syilx territories, we engage with Indigenous feminist scholarship to expose how coloniality and gender intersect in attempts to erase Indigenous sovereignty to structure and naturalize provincial fire policy and its emplaced impacts on Indigenous legal orders. Our analysis contextualizes settler-colonial provincial fire management policy in the purview of Indigenous legal orders to foreground how racial-colonial and gendered politics are obscured when colonial fire and wildfire practices are naturalized. Revisiting key moments in the political development of fire suppression across so-called BC, we contend that the suppression paradox is embedded in and reproduces a colonial logic that widens existing social and economic gaps. These gaps are uniquely gendered, as settler coloniality operates upon patriarchal lines that have actively attempted to erase Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples, including the laws and legal authorities that they possess and practice. Considering the 1910 Fulton Commission, we highlight an example of how women and Indigenous people were excluded from the political decision-making structures that shaped colonial fire management practices in BC. These gendered and racialized exclusions bear directly on the exclusion of Indigenous women and gender-diverse folx, and Indigenous legal orders guided by matriarchal lines of fire knowledge.